Aircraft docking guidance refers to a process of guiding an arriving aircraft from a gate position to a designated exact stop position. The aim of the docking guidance is to ensure safe and accurate docking of the arriving aircraft, to facilitate accurate cooperation of the aircraft with various ground interfaces (ground crews), and to make the passenger boarding bridge (PBB) accurately connected to the aircraft door and thereby improve the efficiency and safety of the airport.
Automated aircraft docking guidance systems may be divided into the following categories depending on the types of the employed sensors:
(1) buried loop coils category; (2) laser scanning and ranging category; (3) visual perception category.
The automated guidance systems using buried loop coils detect whether there is a metal object passing or stopping to determine the position of an arriving aircraft. The systems using the buried loop coils have advantages such as fast response speed, low costs and no requirements on weather and illumination, but these systems are not accurate and have low anti-interference capability. Also, leads and electronic elements buried in the ground can be broken easily and have low reliability, and such elements have low measurement accuracy, cannot identify aircraft types, and are less debuggable and maintainable.
The laser scanning-based docking guidance systems determine real time positions, speeds and types of aircrafts by laser scanning and ranging. Such laser is safe to eyes, and less influenced by environment and climate, has a location accuracy up to millimeter orders, and is easy to maintain. Thus, the laser scanning-based docking guidance systems are completely capable of handling increasingly heavy reception tasks at airports.